Until now. The latest iteration of artificial intelligence has captured the attention of politicians around the world. It seems that the latter can’t do enough to promote and support it, in the hope of deriving huge economic benefits, both directly, in the form of local AI companies worth trillions, and indirectly, through increased efficiency and improved services. That current favoured status has given AI leaders permission to start saying the unsayable: that copyright is an obstacle to progress, and should be reined in, or at least muzzled, in order to allow AI to reach its full potential.
The author seems to have fallen for two tricks at once: The MPAA/RIAA playbook of seeing all engagement with content through the lens of licensing, and the AI hype machine telling everyone that someday they will love AI slop.
He mentions people complaining that stock photo sites, book portals, and music streaming services are all degrading in quality because of AI slop, but his conclusion is that people will start seeking out AI content because it’s not copyrighted.
Regardless… The position of those in power has not changed. They never believed in copyright as a guiding concept, only as a means to an end. That end being: We, the powerful, will control culture, and we will use it to benefit ourselves.
Before generative AI, the approach was to keep the cultural landscape well-groomed – something you’d wanna pay to experience. Mindfully grown and pruned, with clear walking paths, toll booths at each entrance, and harsh penalties for littering or stepping on the grass. You were allowed to have your own toll-free parks outside of the secure perimeter, that continue the walking paths in ways that are mutually beneficial, as long as visitors don’t track mud in as a result.
But now? The landscape is no longer about creating a well-manicured amusement park worth the price of admission. There’s oil under the surface. And it’s time to frack the hell out of it. It’s too bad about the toxic slurry that will accumulate up top, making the walled and unwalled parks alike into an intolerable biohazard. There are resources to extract. Externalities are an end-user problem.
Yeah, turning culture into an expensive amusement park was a horrible mistake. But I wouldn’t get too eager to gloat over seeing the tide of sludge pour over their walls. We’ll still be on the outside, drowning in it.
Excellent description of the zeitgeist.
Your portrait of before generative AI is a bit hard to square with the ad driven internet, but fits ever better the further back you go.
Yeah, we’re turning it all to shit in so many ways simultaneously, it’s truly something awful to behold. Maybe there is a singularity coming after all, but it’s not one like the credulous tech worshippers imagined.
“Turning culture into an expensive amusement park” - made me think of Mark Fishers Capitalist Realism essay. He articulated well how capitalism absorbs everything and sells it back to us as a monetizable commodity, only that its version is a replica, it has no soul, only a form. What remains is an aesthetics, looking close enough to the real thing for a person who has actually no idea. Even “counter-culture” is absorbed and emptied of all content to become just another flavor of the “mainstream”.
AI is the perfect tool for capitalism, because it works in a similar way. A kind philosophical zombie, a parrot that can replicate the buzzwords and mannerisms, one that wants to convince the customers they get a certain value or quality, without truly having it. It’s just as real, meaningful and authentic as green- and rainbow- washed marketing campaigns of huge corporations.
In the previous phase, capitalism absorbed our cultures and values and made a corrupted version into a part of itself, and now it tries to absorb the human soul and thought, to sell it back to us as a service.
I’m not against AI as a technology in principle, I’m no luddite. The problem are those who currently control this power, and what they do with it.
I’m not against AI as a technology in principle, I’m no luddite.
Perhaps not a luddite, but a Luddite.
The actual followers of Ned Ludd weren’t opposed to technology. They were, in many cases, experts in the machinery — sometimes having built the machines they would later destroy.
They opposed the new social order that seemed to inevitably arrive with the machinery. The capitalists would make more money than before, the workers less, and also endure more dangerous working conditions.
Btw, your note about absorbing and repackaging counter-culture reminded me of Rebel Sell by Andrew Potter. There’s a good episode of You Are Not So Smart about it: https://youarenotsosmart.com/2012/10/08/yanss-podcast-episode-five
I don’t think people understand, big companies don’t want copyright to go away. They want themselves to be untouchable while being able to make strikes against poor people. They probably also want to change it so unlike now where copyright is about coming first they’d rather it be about being rich.
What big tech companies really want is the opposite of copyright abolition. They want control, they’ve always wanted control. Make no mistake, no matter how much they make it seem like it, they aren’t on the side of piracy.
lol, sure NOW they want to classify it as Imaginary Property, now that the tech bros think they can make money. All while OpenAI holds a copyright on the ChatGPT model.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!
Fitting that the techbro fascists who have more money than god are yet again trying to rob everyone in plain sight. The sort of AI these grifters are pushing is rarely providing benefit to humanity, is still a solution in search of a problem, and it’s propped up almost entirely by venture capital.
They want weaker copyright, because they’re trying to tread water in the hope that this grift will pan out, if only they can hold out long enough; they need a reason to tell their investors that True Innovation™ is just around the corner, if only they had unrestricted access to everything.
They already steal everything and ignore copyright without exception, so if anyone falls for this line of reasoning, I have a bridge with a great view to sell them.
But copyright being muzzled so humans can reach their full potential is right out
So piracy is no longer stealing, right?
You can’t steal ideas, they don’t belong to anyone once you share them.
Piracy was never stealing, anyone who said it was is either an idiot or a troll (those anti-piracy astroturfers would fall into the second category).
never was
Let them fight.
It’s been funny over the past year or two seeing threads in piracy forums where people were upset with AI trainers scraping pirated material to train their AI with. I’m curious where the general consensus will eventually land.
People shunning or putting down training AI with pirated images while engaging in and promoting piracy themselves are hypocritical idiots because they’re engaging in the very thing they are shunning. You can’t shun copyright infringement and take part in it at the same time, that’s idiotic and destroys your credibility.
Open source everything. Problem solved? No more patents. Problem solved? IP becomes people owned. Problem solved?
Open source generally depends quite heavily on copyright, though. None of the copyleft licenses work without it.
Considering who lobbies for and enforces copyright these days (rich assholes) and the amount put into anti-piracy and anti-sharing campaigns I don’t think it’s helping much in those areas. Companies these days often violate GPL with little to no consequence (name one time a company got in trouble and there’s probably 100 that didn’t).
Open source licenses came about because of copyrights. If people didn’t try to hoard information, the GPL never would have been needed in the first place.
Not actually the case. GPL’s “viral” nature depends on copyright prohibiting the use of the code you publish without agreeing to the GPL’s conditions. Without copyright you could take GPLed code and use it in a closed-source program without publishing your own version or licencing it under the GPL. Most copyleft licenses are like that, including stuff like the Creative Commons.
the GPL does not protect against information hoarding
Maybe I phrased it wrong?
“Leaders” that termed is used very losely in corporate context… Parasites want to feel good about themselves so they pay for these articles lol
